If time rewinds then our memories of the future are erased.
We would not know the difference…
Say if the universe is akin to a living system and time is analogous to the universe breathing… with exhales(T_fwd) more dominant than inhales(T_rev). The periodicities are like temporary resets and the “big bang” was an initial exhale after a tremendous reset.
This breathing occurs on a macro and micro level…
Physicists have long described time as an arrow — pointing one direction, from past to future, driven by the steady increase of disorder in the universe. But what if that arrow isn’t rigid, and time behaves more like breathing? In this picture, the universe alternates between two phases: an “exhale,” where things unfold forward and possibilities collapse into definite events — the world you experience, moment to moment — and a much subtler “inhale,” where possibilities briefly expand again before the next exhale explores them. The exhale dominates overwhelmingly, which is why time feels one-directional to us. But the small, constant inhale is what keeps the system from ever fully locking into a single, static outcome.
This breathing happens at two very different scales at once, and the relationship between them is the interesting part. At the smallest scale, it’s happening everywhere, constantly — every time a particle interacts, every time some piece of reality “decides” an outcome, that’s a tiny exhale following a tiny inhale. Most of these stay local: an atom decays, a measurement is made, nothing beyond that event notices. But occasionally — vanishingly rarely — enormous numbers of these small events line up in phase with each other, the way individual magnetic atoms in a piece of iron can suddenly all point the same direction at once instead of canceling out randomly. When that synchronization happens at the largest possible scale, you get a macro-breath: a reset of the universe’s entire temporal structure, with the Big Bang understood as the first great exhale following such a synchronization.
What makes this a genuinely testable idea, rather than just a poetic reframing of existing physics, is that it doesn’t require destroying information to reset the universe — it only requires reshuffling how that information gets read out. The underlying substrate could, in principle, retain a full record of what came before, even while the observable sequence of events starts over from scratch — much like reformatting a hard drive doesn’t necessarily erase the data, just the map used to find it. That means any “memory” of a prior universe wouldn’t show up as some leftover signal breaking through from before the reset — it would be structurally inaccessible from inside the new one, by the same logic that makes any built-in correlations in the framework non-signaling. The open scientific work is finding what, if anything, could still leave a trace: a subtle asymmetry, a statistical fingerprint, something that survives even though direct access to the “before” is closed off in principle.